Claudia den Boer

Claudia den Boer (1979, NL) studied visual arts and photography at art academy AKV|St.Joost and lives and works in the Netherlands. Her most recent and long-term personal project was made into a photo book in the fall of 2016. The book has been exhibited at Photo festival Naarden (NL), Athens Photo Festival (GR) and is part of I Book Show in Brighton (UK) and St.Petersburg (RU).
Recently her work was also shortlisted and selected for the collection of FotoFilmic/PULP Gallery in Vancouver (CA). To Claudia photography is a means to explore and examine how she relates to places and spaces. Place as a phenomenon fascinates her because of it’s omnipresence; we move through places in each moment of the day, it’s what we see around us, it’s where we meet each other, it’s the decor as it were in which our lives play out. She believes places to have a great influence on our state of mind.

Anchors

In 2012 Claudia got interested in silence; what it is, where it occurs, what it means or provokes. Starting from small villages, the landscapes she felt drawn to and which she photographed, became more and more quiet. The desert then slowly became her focus. The desert is not only a place where it’s literally quiet, but can also be interpreted as a metaphor for silence; it’s where a specific place and a ‘state of mind’ comes together. But to her being in silence is a two-sided experience; it brings her closer to herself, yet at the same time it is frightening to look at. Confronted with the vastness and silence of the landscape, she was looking for something to hold on to in the images she was making. A branch, a rock, a tree, a house, an anchor. ‘Anchors’ therefore became the title of the book in which 24 images are brought together. The images are made between 2012 and 2015 on Dutch Islands, in small Belgian and Southern France villages, the New Mexican desert USA, the Tibetan Highlands and the Moroccan Sahara.